He's no Pete Davidson.

That Taylor Swift endorsed Biden and Kanye West endorsed Trump really tells you a lot about how politics changed since 2009. Anyway, I can't answer this question, but if you want to know why people *should* refer to Taylor Swift as a genius but don't, I can write a bunch about that.

Hiphop had a creative wave that had basically faded by 2003. College Dropout was a great album, ambitious and successful, came at the right time to be widely beloved maybe by people who are now of an age to be writing about culture.

A later Joni Mitchell.

At any rate, Josh Groban sings the tweets of Kanye West is certainly genius: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Axzxe1a78E

I'm still stuck on today's Taylordle.

Yeah, it's a toughy, got it on the last guess, though I really should have gotten it in 5. It's just a weird pattern, the connection to Taylor is easy once you have it.

I just got it.

3 might be right but I'm old and I didn't know who he was until Kim married him. I knew some of the songs but I didn't know the singer.

ELIW = Explain it like I'm white?

I wondered about that too.

Um, I'm white, but (a) he had a string of 4-5 albums that were very-good-to-great and made bold, unexpected artistic choices and (b) he has relentlessly hyped himself as a visionary genius. Being bipolar probably reinforces (b) in some incredibly problematic ways.

Genius is inherently problematic as a concept, and the world would be much better off if we removed the word from the language. It's really just "brilliant" and "genius", there aren't any other synonyms with anything like the same kind of problems.

made bold, unexpected artistic choices

Say more!

"George Bush doesn't care about Black people" generated such an enormous amount of goodwill towards Kanye that he's still enjoying its benefits today?

Have you listened to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy ogged? I don't know if it proves that Kanye is a "genius", but it is one of the very few hip-hop albums I love.

The other thing about this album, is that it appears to show a great deal of self-knowledge. I'm not sure if Ye forgot what he figured out about himself, or if he decided that his genius is so vast and transcendent it makes his flaws irrelevant.

The best case for Kanye's genius is his work as a producer. He's one of the 4 or 5 most influential hip hop producers of the past 20 years. Given hip hop's massive cultural/musical influence over that time, and given the creative importance of the role of the producer plays in hip hop (and in hip hop-influenced R&B and pop) that makes him one of the most influential producers in pop music period.

Among influential hip hop producers, he's among the most versatile: there's a huge difference between his early influential work and his more recent (also influential) work, and he dips into lots of different genres while being able to make huge pop hits.

He'd probably still be counted as among the most influential producers if he'd never recorded his own solo albums. As a rapper, he's really not very skilled at all. That said, Dark Twisted Fantasy is an amazing album with a singular artistic vision, and it's hard to imagine, say, Pharrell Williams recording an album like it.

To be fair, he has a much better hat.

I don't know from Kanye, but once we get this issue settled, I want to find out why Scalia was so often referred to as "brilliant."

I used to think Kanye was a brilliant rapper, but this has really recalibrated my standards.

18: Same reason as Kanye, he's successful and also an asshole.

When lawyers are talking about themselves "brilliant" simply means "made stuff I already believed anyway sound like a good idea."

Sorry, I meant when lawyers talk about *other* lawyers.

16 is right. Kanye did significant and influential work as a producer (most notably on Jay-Z's The Blueprint, I guess)--a lotta interesting digital manipulation of samples.

All this pretty much answers my question. Thanks folks!

Now that the question is closed, here's something to wreck your lives: https://wikitrivia.tomjwatson.com/

That's a nifty game, but I played 3 times and got exactly 7 every time, which is weird.

I got 11 this last time and I've never even heard of Inbar Lavi.

Yeah, West has always been a pedestrian rapper but the early albums are all really interesting sonically and really different from each other. But Life of Pablo was spotty, Ye was terrible, and once he started yammering about Jesus I stopped paying attention altogether.

27: I feel like it was a glitch that the description of St George, said "4th Century Christian Saint and Martyr"

Finally did actually well:🥈 Streak: 14

29: yeah that happened to me once too, it's just taking the description directly from Wikipedia, which wasn't intended for this game.

It also treats invented characters from the Bible as though they're historical, which is annoying.

🥈 Best Streak: 10

I'm a bit embarrassed how many tries it took me to do that well.

I like some of the blurbs. "George IV: Art collector."

Choice one: "Sunflowers (Van Gogh series)". Choice two: "The Starry Night". I'm supposed to guess which of those came first???

(I got it right, and if I had got it wrong, it wouldn't have been the first time I screwed up early and refreshed the page. But still!)

I did appreciate how "Mycenaean Greece" has dates visible in the thumbnail if you squint or zoom in.

"Americas: Supercontinent: Discovered", and the accepted answer is 1492. I feel like that should be controversial.

The silliest one I had to do was something like "cave paintings" and "prehistoric art." I think I correctly guessed that cave paintings were older?

My current record is 22, though I think I've played enough that I have a bit of an advantage seeing the same thing more than once.

22 is my high score, but 7 or 8 is a lot more usual.

I've never really liked Kanye, and his rapping is nothing special. Seconding those who point to his production, though.

I did quite like his Glastonbury performance, though. Or at least, I liked the first 20 minutes of it before I got bored. There's something about the sheer egomania of it--just him on stage for a really long time--and the starkness of the sound, and it really annoyed the boomer* types of my acquaintance.

* that innt proper music, wi' guitars and that.

Lbut if you want to know why people *should* refer to Taylor Swift as a genius but don't, I can write a bunch about that.

I'd be curious to read this, if you feel like writing it. Due to my reactionary anti-pop sensibility, I find it easier to like her recent work with the guy from the National.

The short version is that although as a singer she ranges from uninteresting to actually bad, her songwriting is genuinely fantastic. She sometimes doesn't get credit for it because a lot of her radio stuff isn't her best work, and because she works best in collaboration. (Well and also because she has no sense of cringe and so her worst stuff (think Bad Blood, or the spoken breakdown in Shake it Off) is just terrible.) But there's so many just truly great songs.

But mostly the point in the context of this thread is that genius is so steeped in being male and not looking like you're trying to hard, and so is utterly inaccessible to someone like Swift.

At any rate I think Folklore is her best album, and I completely agree that her folk phase was the easiest one for me to get into. But once I got started there's a lot of other great stuff. I somehow hadn't realized before Folklore that the non-radio cuts are mostly for people who like singer-songwriters and not pop stars. Some other great albums are Red, 1989, and Speak Now (if you can put up with a little country). I didn't realize until the pandemic that if you grew up listening to say Paul Simon and Suzanne Vega, but not Brittney Spears that you should be listening to Taylor Swift albums.

But if you like Folklore and don't know the older stuff beyond the radio, maybe I'd say listen to Red and just skip any song you don't like. Or for a currated subset of Red, try: State of Grace, Treacherous, All Too Well (the 5 minute version, dear god please), I Almost Do, Holy Ground, Begin Again.

Like Taylor Swift is exactly the stereotype of the person who gets the best grade in the class because they do the best work, and then the recommendation letter is all about how she works hard.

Plus, she's really convinced me that Jake Gyllenhaal is an asshole.

Truly committed to never getting over anything. I find it very relatable.

Kanye hasn't convinced me Pete Davidson is as asshole and I started out thinking Pete was probably an asshole.

I didn't realize until the pandemic that if you grew up listening to say Paul Simon and Suzanne Vega, but not Brittney Spears that you should be listening to Taylor Swift albums.

Just as a point of reference, have you listened to much Rosanne Cash (she's more clearly country, but a really good singer-songwriter: https://americana-uk.com/essentials-the-top-10-rosanne-cash-songs

There's a song that I thought was Paul Simon but somehow good. It turned out to be someone else. I think it was "Over the Rhine."

48: hadn't tried before, listening to some now. So far I'm not taken with it, it gives me a bit too much of CCM-vibes in terms of the sound. But I often take some time to warm up to new music.

A country singer-songwriter I ran across by accident and recently that I liked was David Ramirez ("people call who they want to talk to").

All Too Well (the 5 minute version, dear god please)

I am not an uber-Swiftie but I live with one, and I've come around to thinking the ten minute version really is superior. I insisted on the shorter version for the Swiftie's voice lesson, because a ten-minute song is a lot, but I think the extra minutes spent wandering the labyrinth give it more force and originality. Also the original version doesn't rhyme "car keys" with "fuck the patriarchy," as far as I can tell?

It's interesting in general experiencing music I wouldn't normally like through a loved one's incredibly ardent fandom. It's like having a drug that suppresses the allergic reaction. The two of us just went to see Gracie Abrams in SF (this is J.J. Abrams' pop-star daughter), and it was fascinating -- at 10, Elke was one of the youngest kids there, but the audience trended adolescent/early 20s and kept throwing gifts onstage and screaming along with the lyrics and handing phones up to Gracie so she could take a selfie and give it back. Someone handed her a votive candle with a picture of Taylor Swift on it; she lit the candle, and then they persuaded her via chanting to cover the first few minutes of "All Too Well," which put my daughter into a matchless state of bliss. Nothing like any live music I ever experienced: the emotional entanglement was just nuts. A little different from Veruca Salt sneering that we were the worst audience they'd ever played for in 1994.

If you want to spend 5 more minutes exploring those themes just listen to Dear John afterwards! The original All Too Well just has such perfect pacing, and such a great continuous buildup to the big moment of emotional release. Also the new one is so to ally weird, where the old stuff is whistful and full of regret, and the new stuff is bitter and angry (not that there's anything wrong with being bitter and angry, but she already did that song and did it better and it's called Dear John).

That was supposed to say "tonally weird."

52 p.s.:Excerpted on Instagram, in fact. (For what it's worth I rather like her song "Camden".) Also -- man, did you know that if you can't sing, you can take lessons with a voice teacher who will teach you to sing? IT IS NUTS. Elke has gone from borderline tone-deafness to being a genuine pleasure to listen to in about 2 months.

53: I will try that!

Update to 50, I was listening to the wrong song (Internet was being weird so couldn't use the link you sent) and I was listening to the wrong songs. The older stuff that's actually country is better.

I'm willing to accept the 10-minute movie version, because then at least it's making a movie about Jake Gyllenhaal which has a certain irony. But even on that measurement it doesn't stand up to writing a John Mayer song about John Mayer.

To be clear, I'm not saying Dear John is better than All Too Well. My ranking of the classic Track 5's is All Too Well > White Horse > Dear John. What I'm saying is that Dear John is better than the added 5 minutes in the long version of All Too Well, and moreover that listening to All Too Well and Dear John consecutively is better than listening to one minute of one and then one minute of the other repeated until you get to the end of both songs.

I asked the 10-year-old for help here and tried to type her reply, but I may have mangled it. "I like the 10-minute version better. I think that the 10 minute version for me is more original because that's the original version, and she had to cut off some of her emotions in order to make it shorter. It's true that those parts are bitter and angry, but that's part of the process." All the Tracks 5 you mention are really good but her favorite is "The Archer." She would now like some hot chocolate.

I just think it's brilliant that she made Jake Gyllenhaal sound like a pathetic man who is probably masturbating to a stolen scarf in such a way that he can't fight back without sounding like someone who hangs around high school parking lots waiting to see when girls are having their 18th birthday.

Hopefully that bit didn't hit the ten-year-old fans as so obvious.

The whole "original version" thing is a lie though. There's a 0% chance that Jake Gyllenhaal had a "fuck the patriarchy" keychain in 2012. Yes there was some original draft of All Too Well that was too long, which is why she called up Liz Rose to help cut it down, but no Taylor Swift is never going to let anyone hear something unpolished like that. The new stuff is new, written to the specification that it be 10 minutes and that it contain the word "fuck" which were the two things she'd said publicly about it. Anyway, the new version isn't awful, and I don't want to shatter a 10-year old fans illusions and don't mind if she believes that, but this is absolutely a hill I'm willing to die on.

And how much did his couch really cost? But still.

I mean the new part has new melody! We're supposed to think she sent the demo to Liz Smith who said "keep all the stuff that has the A melody, and cut all the stuff with the B melody but no other notes"?

Anyway, I approve of The Archer as a top choice, it's a banger.

(Also "your lovers stay the same age" clearly exhibits knowledge of Jake Gyllenhaal's subsequent dating history which was not available in 2012, but I'll stop.)

Anyway I'm in on Rosanne Cash, good stuff, especially "A Feather's Not a Bird" and "Western Wall."

Anyway I'm in on Rosanne Cash, good stuff, especially "A Feather's Not a Bird" and "Western Wall."

Yay, I appreciate you giving it enough of a chance to find stuff you liked. A couple other things I'd encourage you to give a listen.

Here's a good recent version of "Seven Year Ache" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qqxTBOarfA

Also, she didn't write the song, but her voice on "500 miles" is incredibly beautiful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpJMbI0fZRY

I love how many concert recordings are easily available now.

Since one of the top 10 was a Bruce Springsteen duet, here's another Bruce duet which I just find delightful: https://youtu.be/5cXzFhZVMnQ

I know we've moved on to Taylor but it's astonishing how perfectly 42.1 captures Kanye (swapping 'rapper' for 'singer' and treating 'producer' and 'songwriter' as equivalent).

I'm more afraid of clear plastic glasses.

71: Interesting! Also interesting that in both cases there's a serious collaboration element. Often "genius" is coded heavily as requiring solo work. I always like it when people work best in collaboration, partly because it's true of me (see Heebie's old "spaghetti throwing" post), but also because the dynamics of working with people is just more interesting and varied than working alone. There's something just really fascinating that Swift wrote Champagne Problems (just an astonishingly good song) with her non-musician boyfriend. I mean it's one thing to write a great song with Dan Wilson, and another thing to do so with someone who doesn't know how to write music.

Music is in everyone's heart.

Great ideas but bad judgement is such an interesting combo.

That's what the premarital counselor said.

I think Dan Wilson is the only example of a Taylor Swift collaborator where my favorite song of theirs is not their collaboration with Swift. (Treacherous is a top 5 TS song for me, but Someone Like You is a really really high bar.) I guess in some objective sense Max Martin's best work is "... Baby One More Time" rather than "Blank Space" or "Style" but I certainly prefer the latter two.

Dan Wilson, also a surprisingly good twitter follow.

Since one of the top 10 was a Bruce Springsteen duet, here's another Bruce duet which I just find delightful: https://youtu.be/5cXzFhZVMnQ

That is really charming.

69: I love how many concert recordings are easily available now.

Recordings of Prince concerts.

I mean, I had always heard that his shows were transcendent, and I knew that not getting to see him perform live was one of my great musical regrets, but the concert recordings available on YouTube these days bring home just how amazing he was. People still rave about "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, or his Superbowl show, but Prince played at that level all. the. time. For the NFL, that was maybe the greatest halftime show ever; for Prince that was any given Sunday. And only a 12-minute show at that. zomg.

77: Both the song and Terry Allen's story of writing a song with Guy Clark is really good (I'm a fan of both of them. the song is sad and angry, but their friendship comes through in his telling of the story): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxQzwfKB1Yo

There's a lot of competition, but I think my favorite bit of the Mountain Goats stage banter is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZNFKxeYZPA

77 - Max Martin (co)wrote Baby One More Time, Blank Space, and Save Your Tears, truly three of the best pop songs of all time.

80 - I saw Prince at the Forum about ten years ago, and it was easily the best concert of my life. Just amazing in every respect. His energy level and musicianship were spectacular, but when you consider his age and the fact that he was playing night after night after night, it's truly hard to believe. Now I look back and think, why did I only go once? He was there for like a whole month. It's not as though I had something better to do.

I almost forgot, I went to the Prince concert with Halford!

Halford was the opener?

85: Janelle Monae?

73: Yeah, the collaboration point is important.

Kanye's best album is MBDTF, and the three best songs on it are Monster, Runaway, and Devil in a New Dress. All three features other artists. Kanye's verses are (by far!) the worst on all three.

But: the best verse of all is Nicki Minaj's verse on Monster. And that verse owes a lot to West's production-- he encouraged her to embrace the voice switches that make it so remarkable.

Truly embarrassed to say I only know Monster from the Adele carpool karaoke.

I knew it, but I didn't have any idea Kanye had anything to do with it before.

Oooh, I like Runaway.

Ok, I think I get it now, I feel like the answer to OP is just listen to Runaway.

The Bon Jovi one?

And... Kanye's banned from the Grammys.

He's going to start working for Putin.

You joke, but: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/kanye-west-russia-trip-1282874/

I hadn't seen that, but it wasn't just a joke from nothing. He's been Trumpy and I think there's kind of brotherhood of shitheads active in the world today.

Having spent several comments making the case for Kanye, I'll be clear that I don't think he's actually a genius, whatever that might mean.

The genius narrative is a combination of (a) he's got a world-historical ego, and is so convinced he's a genius that he's convinced other people to go along with it; (b) he's had success at a number of different things-- production, solo artist, fashion designer, label head... and there's a tendency to treat these as independent accomplishments rather than all emerging out of the same thing; (c) there's an unhealthy cultural view about the connection between artistic creativity and mental illness; and (d) Jay Z calls him a genius on Lucifer.

I don't personally rank him super highly as a producer. I think Pharrell is better at the thing Kanye is supposed to be great at: combining "can make huge pop hits", "can make super hard hip hop beats" and "is distinctive and musically innovative." I think lots of less pop-minded hip hop producers are better beat makers. And if we're picking a producer from the past 20 years to label a genius it should be J Dilla.

They both have better taste in hats than Kanye.

I googled J Dilla because I didn't know who he was. The top hits all had him in hats.

Kanye!

(To the tune of "Kobe!")

This is going back a ways, but if we were picking rap geniuses from 20 years ago, I'd put a plug in for Missy Elliot and Timbaland, both separately and together.

That's going back a ways, but I feel really old because I'm now older than Catwoman's mom would be if she were still alive and not fictional.

Keith Shocklee and the Bomb Squad.

Let's say you don't like hip hop (and let's put aside for the moment whether that's an inherently racist viewpoint), what are the 5 hip hop songs you should listen to? The Jolene's of Hip Hop as it were.

I don't particularly like hip hop, but I absolutely love, "Memories Live" by Talib Kwali, it might also appeal to you as, essentially, a singer-songwriter hip-hop track https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvNRaF9YLU0

105: We need more information! Why does this person not like hip hop? Too misogynist? Don't like party music? Give us more to go on.

Definitely don't like party music. I think a big part of the problem is I'm just not very good at hearing or caring about rhythm or maybe just low sounds in general, like I couldn't tell you the bass line from literally any song. I'm pretty melody/lyrics focused in general. Obviously would prefer non-misogynist stuff, but that's not the main issue, there's plenty of problematic stuff on that front that I nonetheless enjoy (Tarantino, Going to Georgia, High Fidelity, ...)

One other recommendation (with, again, the caveat that I don't have much sense of Hip-hop as a genre, these are just random tracks I am fond of): "8pt Agenda"

If you don't care about rhythm, hip hop might be a hard sell, but (with apologies for being such an old person), I think my Jolenes (or Dyer Makers, h/t heebie) of hip hop would probably include:

- Tribe Called Quest - Check the Rhime
- Arrested Development - Tennessee
- Geto Boys - Mind Playing Tricks On Me
- Warren G - This DJ
- 2Pac - To Live and Die in LA
- Dr. Dre - Forgot About Dre
- Young MC - Bust a Move

I think part of why Runaway really works for me is that a bunch of the rhythm is piano and hence in a register I pay attention to.

No Diggity by Blackstreet is really digestible and easy to like.

(or Dyer Makers, h/t heebie)

I laughed.

Kanye has lots of good songs. depending where you draw the genius line he is is on the genius side of it.

he is definitely on an artistic decline but like this song from last year is still very good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sJZOGxRxwM&ab_channel=KanyeWestVEVO

Starting a song with a 24 sec sample of your mom is a big swing move.

Probably Hey Ya has to be on a most-easily digested R&B list, but it's really not rap. But definitely maybe Ms. Jackson or something from OutKast should be on the D'yer Mak'er list. Something from Hamilton should be there, too.

My personal OutKast song is Wheelz of Steel.

Yeah, I was going to say other than "Hey Ya" which is obvious enough even for me to know.

When did basketball players start wearing leggings?

Saying you're into lyrics not rhythm means not looking for greatest hits I think
Any such list should start with Grandmaster Flash's The Message. Hard to put into words just how different and revolutionary that sounded when it was new. Public Enemy's Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos second, I'd say.

Lauryn Hill.

I like Knaan's lyrics a lot. He's originally Somali, try "what's Hardcore".

Maybe Goodie Mob, Black Ice or anything else off of that album?

It's a style now basically gone, but Biz Markie told funny stories, Sometimes Tribe Called Quest did also, Left My Wallet in El Segundo.

Lil Wayne has a fantastic lyrical style, but has nothing to say and lots of his songs are unpleasant.

Collaborative playlist? I still have spotify, I would be happy to seed one if there's any interest.

Assembling hiphop suggestions, but I feel like this is above and beyond the usual MPAA guidelines.

Deep Water Rated R for bored fellatio and passionate murders.

They've had a thing about blow jobs since Brown Bunny.

102: Timbaland and Pharrell went to high school together. I bet their band classes were pretty OK.

"Rapper's Delight" by the Sugar Hill Gang is the "Rock Around the Clock" of hip-hop. I'm not sure it's one of the Jolenes of the genre, but it belongs on a list of some sort.

110: A list which is gonna skew toward music that I, a deeply unfunky suburban white guy now in his 40s listened to when I was younger.

* "Paid in Full" by Eric B. and Rakim (I'm not knowledgable enough to be sure if it's correct that Rakim is given credit for introducing internal rhyme and more complex flows to hip-hop, but it's a real "oh this is when rap starts to sound more like modern rap and less like toasting" change); I'd also accept "When I Be on the Mic" or the James Brown-sampling "I Know You Got Soul" off the same album
* "Nuthin' but a G Thang" by Dre and Snoop (introduces G-funk in the '90s, unless maybe "Regulate" came out first? See my comment about not knowing what I'm talking about)
* "Hypnotize" by Biggie (Biggie's biggest hit; the East Coast champion of the East Coast/West Coast feud that led to both Tupac and Biggie being killed)
* "CREAM" by the Wu-Tang Clan. They ain't nothin' to fuck with. "Liquid Swords" gets my vote for the single best hiphop album ever, but this is maybe a better starting point?
* "All Caps" by Madvillain (MF DOOM and Madlib). I thought about putting "Doomsday", which is I think a better song, but I think maybe the production on this is more interesting/accessible? There's a whole crap-ton of MF DOOM stuff that I think might be fun for a non-hiphop fan, in fact, e.g. "Hey!" off "Operation: Doomsday" which gets real mileage out of the Scooby Doo theme.

123 was me.

For me, I'm somewhat out of touch with what's happening in hip-hop. I used to listen to a lot circa 1990s through to the early 2000s and then sort of drifted away. But, I think a lot of the genius of the best hip-hop records is the production, as much as it's the lyrics and flow. So, Dr Dre, the Bomb Squad and the RZA, or even, e.g. Dan the Automator* or the Dust Brothers** (for me) are a big part of why I like the music from that period: classic Public Enemy, Wu-Tang and the various solo projects (esp. GZA's Liquid Swords and Raekwon's Only Built 4 Cuban Linx), some of the G-Funk stuff like The Chronic, etc.

* for a particular favourite, the Dr Octagonecologyst album.
** for Paul's Boutique.

[I'm sure I messed up the hyperlinks here!]

Snarkout and ttaM's lists are great. They're also mostly unlikely to appeal to someone who doesn't hear bass lines.

Dr Dre is a good source of 'Jolene' equivalents (i.e. jukebox classics even casual fans recognize) that have high synths carry the rhythm:
Next Episiode
Nuthin' But a G Thang
Still D.R.E

Since we started with Kanye, here's 2 of his early songs that have melodies and that will be in the 'Jolene' jukebox. The first is built around a sped-up soul sample, which was his signature for a while. The second is built around a church choir.
Through the Wire
Jesus Walks

Definitely in the jukebox, and winning the 'absolutely everyone knows all the words' category, is Juicy

Most of the above are lyrically accessible. But lots of avowedly "lyrical" hip hop is lyrically dense and complex. Which is great! (Enthusiastic second for snarkout's DOOM recommendation.) But can be impenetrable to non-fans, and not only because 'lyrical' rappers love to rap about rapping. Here's an excellent example of that kind of thing done at a really high level:
Black Thought freestyle

My question wasn't really about tailored to me specifically, I'm fine trying out all-time greats even if they're not aimed at me specifically. I listened to all the ones in 110 yesterday, and Tennessee and Forgot about Dre were the standouts to me. (Though still Runaway is my favorite on this thread, so maybe now I'm on team actually Kanye is a genius.)

Also all of this is going to help me with my abysmal Learned League Pop Music percentage.

Haven't caught up on all the new suggestions yet though.

GZA and I have a mutual friend.

But did you listen to the song in 106?

Not yesterday, trying it now.

I hope you like it. I think it's brilliantly written -- both a bunch of individually great lines and a well structured exception of the theme -- "raising a child has me reflecting on my own life and appreciating where I've come from and what I have now."

Per the original topic, there's only one Genius in hiphop and it's GZA.

"There's only been one genius in this business, and that was Señor Wences. A little lipstick, some hair, and his hand, and the guy had a career for eighty-five years."

5 is hard! Here's my idiosyncratic picks (non-overlapping because there are a bunch of good ones already) for someone who's not very into hiphop.

1. Express Yourself by NWA
2. Life's a Bitch by Nas
3. Gangsta's Paradise by Coolio
4. Daydreamin' Lupe Fiasco ft Jill Scott
5. Stronger, Kanye West

And a bonus because I think Jay-Z is super likable:
Heart of the City (Ain't No Love) ft Keon Bryce

I'm gonna be the old white guy recommending the old white rapper, but I am an Aesop Rock fanboy. None Shall Pass, Rings.

135: That's a great list! Very different records, but all of 'em definitely melodically 'catchy.'

Nas' Illmatic is my favourite album of all time in any genre. It just so, so good.

Upetgi: Let's say I wanted to understand the appeal of Taylor Swift. Where should I begin?

All Too Well (5 minute), August, Blank Space, Champagne Problems. If you already know Blank Space maybe sub in Getaway Car instead.

Those Dre tracks were a great suggestion. Got distracted from the suggestions by just listening to The Chronic and then had an airport run today so didn't end up listening to the non-Dre suggestions.

Maybe those are too much in the sad side, you sub in New Years Day instead of Champagne Problems.

i was in the neighborhood bike shop yesterday, where i bought my beloved italian, bc of a flat & it was made clear to me by the taciturn hipster dad proprietor that i am expected to learn how to fix a flat myself, tweak the transmission, etc., v intimidating, also all the other (exclusively male) denizens of the shop were (understandably) confused as to why this lady was getting all this attention, i think bc it's obvious i'm riding the italian a lot? brake pads replaced, tires wearing down, etc. anyways taciturnity was thrown to the winds & i ended up discussing music & recommending anything combining nimbus & vlado perlmutter, you really can't go wrong. i stand by this rec.

We need more information! Why does this person not like hip hop?

I'll play. Possible reasons include 1) likes music for singing along time, would feel and sound idiotic rapping and 2) doesn't like music genres that are meant to be played really loud.

I mean but also not everyone likes every genre. I'm not interested in classic rock or metal or basically any dance music genre. Most people hate opera, which I like.

141: don't you have that bit when you get your first bike as a kid and your parents sit you down and explain how to fix flat tyres? Big sense of I AM NOW A RESPONSIBLE AUTONOMOUS PERSON, if I remember.

Oooh, 142.1 for sure.

At any rate I don't think the point of this is that I'll come out of it loving hip hop, but I do think that it's good to just have some better sense what the deal is. Like I don't like Opera but if you asked me to name a Wagner opera I could or to hum a Wagner tune I could ("Kill the wabbit!"). Whereas obviously I've done enough xwords to know who Dre is and I know he's almost a billionaire due to Apple stock, but I wouldn't have been able to name a Dre song and now I can!

My feeling on opera is i'd just always rather be listening to musical theater. I get why pre-microphones you had to sing in a certain way in a large room, but now we have microphones and I just don't like classical solo voice.

137: Thank you! We had fun listening to a bunch of things to refine it. AJ thinks Gangsta's Paradise is a cheesy pick, but I think it was a huge mainstream hit, with enough typical hiphop elements that it's pretty good for someone not really into the really traditional sound.

I think the Gray Album is a good point of entry for someone familiar with the Beatles (you don't have to like the Beatles, but because it's a mashup and not just samples, it's easy to understand how it's out together, so to speak).

141: And for someone who hates working out, having the beat and the boasting and the upbeat stuff isn't so apt, either. (Stronger is one of my favorite tunes for the gym, easy to sing along with without feeling like an asshole but "I'd do anything for a blond dyke" probably sits better on me than you.)

With opera, or classical singing in general, I really like most stuff up to and including Monteverdi. I really like bits of Handel, but would never listen to an entire opera.

Then, I basically want to swerve everything until we get to the 20th century. That's not really anything specific about opera, though. I don't really like most non-chamber music between about 1750 and about 1900, whereas I'm there for Stravinsky, Webern, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, etc. It does mean that most of the big Verdi, Mozart, Rossini, etc operas do nothing for me. There are individual singers, though, who can sell me on specific arias, even if it's not from a composer or a period I generally like. Sandrine Piau, for example.

Weirdly enough the Grey Album I actually know and liked and listened to reasonably often in college. At this point I only remember the 99 problems/Helter Skelter though.

148.last: I assume the whole song is about his work to be a better ally.

Of course the other hip hop I know reasonably well is Hamilton, because RWM was a fan. I like it ok, but my feeling is that if I'm in the mood for an iconic Broadway historical musical about a revolution featuring a rotating stage and an iconic show-stopper about a woman setting up her unrequited love with someone else, well I won't be going with Hamilton.

144: I wondered why I never experienced this, and then I remembered that neither of my parents ever rode a bike. That explains so much.

I really liked the first act of Hamilton. The asshole should have lived a better life at the end to make a better musical.

152: I know the other show you're talking about should be obvious, but not to me. I don't actually know anything about Evita -- does that fit?

155: He's talking about The Mikado.

144: tbh bikes have been like rec drugs for me - someone else (a guy, let's not pretend) has always taken care of bike maintenance, just like with rec drugs someone else has always procured them. i would never go to the trouble of figuring out how to source a rec drug let alone shell out for it, but alas seems i am finally going to learn how to tackle basic bike maintenance. i am a fantastic stalwart contributor to households & relationships in other ways, just don't look to me for anything mechanical or involving obscure shadowy sourcing.

we have a dizzying array of music around the place & i like nearly all of it depending on context (atonal in the late afternoon no thanks & cannot stand oregon-esque noodley jazz omg sends me right around the bend) but the better half has not added any rap or hip hop so he has his limits.

144.2:"Atonal in the late afternoon" sounds like a great title for something, but I can't figure out what.

156: I'm sure that's wrong, but I also don't know the actual answer.

156 was not a serious answer but maybe Les Mis?

149: okay, genuinely amazed that you don't get much out of "Don Giovanni". The one day I put it on at work (for... some reason; there's always A Research Project), I was so distracted by how great it was, minute to minute, that I finally had to turn it off to restore productivity. (I am generally kind of sympathetic to "skip the 19th century" aesthetic choices, but I've been chipping away at this tendency for decades.)

155: this has got to be kind of a microgeneration thing, right? I assume it's "Les Miserables."

157/bike tires: I've swapped out tubes many times (although never actually patched one in the field or anything), and this has led me to hate it so much that I'm always about one short step away from a toddler meltdown when I have to do it. The euphoria that comes from handing the wheel to a professional and paying them stupid amounts of money to fix it for me is cheap at any price. Yes I'm exaggerating for effect, and yes I had poorly matched tires/rims for a while, and also SHUUUUUUT UPPPPPPPP. Why does it suck that much? Absolutely no idea.

re: 157

Basic bike maintenance, especially on older style bikes like that is pretty straightforward. Some things that are more common on modern bikes (hydraulic brakes, tubeless tyres, etc) are a bit trickier. Fixing a flat, if it's a normal clincher style tyre with an inner tube is really easy, and I think would definitely fall under home maintenance for almost anyone. Anything else, involving gears or brakes (other than oiling the chain now and again), I don't see any reason not to just take it to a shop if you don't want to learn how to do it.

I'm sort of in an in-between place. I can do most simple things myself, but I am not able to do everything. I need to take mine into a shop soon to get the front derailleur seen to, as I think something has snapped or snagged inside the shifter.

dq, did he at least give/sell you tire levers? Puncturing tubes with a butter knife was one of my early manifestations of genius.

It's much easier if you just use an awl.

Basic bike maintenance, especially on older style bikes like that is pretty straightforward. Some things that are more common on modern bikes (hydraulic brakes, tubeless tyres, etc) are a bit trickier. Fixing a flat, if it's a normal clincher style tyre with an inner tube is really easy, and I think would definitely fall under home maintenance for almost anyone. Anything else, involving gears or brakes (other than oiling the chain now and again), I don't see any reason not to just take it to a shop if you don't want to learn how to do it.

That precisely describes the level of bike maintenance I do (changing tubes, chain lube, take it to a shop for much beyond that). I occasionally feel like I should learn more bike maintenance but at this point I'm comfortable with the fact that I'd rather pay someone else to do it.

I watched parts of the recent Les Mis movie and was mostly struck by the fact that they seem to have gone out of their way to cast leading roles with people who don't sing very well.

Yes, I meant Les Mis, and yes the movie had awful singers.

As Victor Hugo intended?

Nomen est omen.

There's a fantastic kids bike maintenance scene in Claire Denis' Les Salauds

Somehow, I've been aware that Les Mis was a musical for decades, and I don't think I could recognize a single note of it. Same for Phantom of the Opera. Did it maybe not have any songs that got played out of the context of the whole thing much?

You really should watch Russell Crowe try to sing.

Surely you saw Susan Boyle sing "I Dreamed a Dream" at some point? Probably you've seen "One Day More" parodied in some way. You must have had some friend in high school whose audition piece was "On My Own"?

Re: bike tires, my last 5 leaks or flats were on city streets on the way to or from work. Fixing the flat on the spot was less convenient than locking my bike up where it was or putting it on a bus, going where I was going, and dealing with the flat later. Maybe at home in the living room, or maybe just by walking it over to the bike shop 6 blocks from home and paying them $25 or so. And of course, I'm not biking to work anymore. These days I'm just biking to the kid's school or the grocery store, both of which are even closer than my old office.

If I ever do an all-day bike trip on trails or rural roads, I hope I have the presence of mind beforehand to make sure I have a repair kit with me and know how to use it, but until then, the alternative is convenient enough.

As for Les Miserables, I would have guessed "Do You Hear the People Sing?" was the second-best-known song, after "I Dreamed a Dream".

I think Taylor Swift is in trouble because the Taylordle is being debased with longer words that are too on the nose.

172: Somehow, nope to all of that. Just fluky, maybe? I should try listening to the cast album and see if anything at all sounds familiar.

Guys, you really do need to learn how to fix punctures on your bikes. I am dead serious about this. You can't go on living this way!

My bike is so old it was made in Birmingham. But the tires are newer.

Thank you for pointing this out during my brief window of having valid 20% off coupons at REI and no idea what to buy.

Thank you Moby for creating ambiguity.

I'm going to buy boots at REI.

On Saturday, I went to the actual store so I could try them on, but they didn't have the right size.

Isn't there still a strike at REI?

Or some kind of labor action

Just listened through the list in 135, very nice! Daydreamin' was the standout for me I think, also Heart of the City. The hardest for me to get into was "Life's a Bitch."

Of course I already know Gangsta's Paradise, and it makes sense that it was a huge hit. The problem for me is less the cheesiness exactly, and more that if you grew up near Amish Country it's real real hard to not just hear the Weird Al version.

I realized one thing, which should be obvious, but I hadn't quite put together. There's a tradeoff between having lyrics that are semantically interesting and ones that are interesting sonically. The tighter the formal poetic constraints are the less you get to turn a phrase with a memorable meaning. Rap lyrics just have much tighter poetic constraints (shorter lines, more internal rhyming, etc.) and as such are much less free to be memorable in terms of meaning then you can do in a simpler poetic structure with longer lines.

REI's union won the vote at the Soho store -- no reason not to shop there now: https://gothamist.com/news/rei-workers-in-soho-voted-to-form-companys-first-union-organizers-say .

It's good they took care of that before 20% coupon season.

183, 185: I no longer shop there very often and I heard an amazing amount of dirt from a former Berkeley employee, so I don't think I have many illusions about its virtue at this point. Getting a tube patch kit for 20% off is probably not a crime on the level of founding a bank, though.

re: 164

Yeah. I can do more. On my current bike I've changed the bottom bracket, replaced pedals, swapped out the disk brake pads, swapped the freehub/cassette (onto a new wheel set), reindexed gears, etc. But cable replacement and a few other things are things I'm much less confident about (I have hybrid brakes).

I used to have to patch bike tubes all the time. We'd always run over sandburs. Fortunately, those don't exist here.

184.3: that's a really interesting observation. There's no clear rap equivalent of, say, John Prine or Jason Isbell, although there are plenty of rap storytellers.

But! Because there are more formal constraints, it's extra great when a rapper turns a great line, and the best are really good at it. One of my favourite examples actually comes from 'Life's a Bitch'!
"the buck that bought a bottle/coulda stuck the lotto" is formally and sonically interesting, and I could write an essay about what the line says about Nas as an artist and a person.

From the Talib Kwali song I've been talking up, I think this is really good songwriting (admittedly, with a loose meter and rhyme scheme).

Like when my parents first split up
Yo, I was illin'
Seems like some years they was together for the sake of the children
And I love them for that

There's a tradeoff between having lyrics that are semantically interesting and ones that are interesting sonically.

I don't know that I buy this. I was musing the other day on the difference between listening to a brilliant person speaking broken English versus an academic idiot using ten dollar words. (This is NOT an analogy!) It drives home the point that languages are infinitely flexible and brilliant people can do brilliant things in all kinds of contexts.

I guess within a range of medium talent, this trade-off would exist, but the world is big enough for plenty of musicians to be both semantically and sonically shitty, and others to be both semantically and sonically amazing.

190.2 Yeah, that's a good point. And this isn't really special to music, you see the same thing in poetry, for example the good parts of The Raven are really really good (should be shorter though).

I did listen to the Talib Kwali song twice but keep doing the ADHD thing where I realize towards the end of the song that I needed to focus more on the words but didn't. Listening to rap lyrics takes a lot more focus to me than listening to sung lyrics. I have a similar problem with books sometimes where I realize I didn't actually read the previous paragraph.

Which made me think, The Raven sounds so rap-like that someone must have tried it, which instead lead to this very early XKCD: https://xkcd.com/133/

This isn't bad a proof of concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzirNU3l5bQ

190: Better rhymes make for better songs / It matters not if you got a lot of what it takes just to get along.

I know that the discussion has moved on from production, but Tracklib (a subscription service for sampling music) has these amazing little YouTube sample breakdown videos that give you a real sense of the musical creativity, skill, and knowledge that go into making hip hop beats.
This one gives you a taste of the idea. (It's no one's suggestion for a brilliant beat! But it captures the process really nicely.) https://youtu.be/5KzISlMoxUE

There's a whole playlist of them. They're all around a minute long, and they visually represent the elements in a really effective way.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmsQco5tySyz-21X81egPr78XLUdJ57uk

When I read the lyrics to "Life's a bitch" I felt better about not being able to figure what they are saying.

Keepin' this Schweppervescent street ghetto essence inside us
'Cause it provides us with the proper insight to guide us

and

Time is illmatic, keep static like wool fabric
Pack a 4-matic to crack your whole cabbage

Those are some crazy couplets!

In an attempt to cross the streams, let me mention brazilian lowrider bicycles
https://fullciclismo.com/reviews/mejores-bicicletas-chopper/
https://www.venta.com.mx/r/Details/bicicleta-chopper-stingray/bicicleta%20chopper%20stingray_mercadolibre_mlm1394027634

Yeah 198 is fun. I'm just nowhere near skilled enough as a listener to pick up on that kind of thing without it really spelled out for me.

Because I am simple, what I got from listening to "Life's a Bitch" was the macho despair in the chorus, and the so-sad trumpet in the end, that was especially touching for me because I know it's played by Olu Dara, Nas's father.

195. I am reminded of a prior attempt to update classical texts to a contemporary idiom: https://genius.com/Lord-buckley-mark-antonys-funeral-oration-annotated

203 Lird Buckley was a genius, you have to hear it for the full effect https://youtu.be/S4lZTgbjFJo

204: Thank you. The first couple of versions I found on youtube weren't what I wanted, but that's it.

199: Those are remarkable!

Lord

Tangential to 195:

Przecławice, Dream Only By Night ("Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night." - Edgar Allan Poe, "Eleonora")

Despite their huge 1982-83 hit "Annabel Lee," Przecławice never became a household word in US pop music. While titling their second single "Za Naszą i Waszą (Wolność)" seems in retrospect an obvious mistake, its anthemic qualities appealed to listeners in the summer of 1983 who were not interested in Michael Jackson or Irene Cara. Indeed, many DJ's received requests in those months for "That Song" by "That Band," and knew exactly what tongue-tied listeners wanted. Przecławice's upbeat rendition of "The Raven," however, peaked at #23 on Billboard's chart, and the band never recovered its chart momentum. Many fans contend their second album, "Seek Not to Convince," was even better than "Dream Only By Night," with tighter compositions and a larger brass section, but the pop moment had moved on, and divisions were already appearing in the unwieldy lineup. Titling their third album "The Fall of the House of Usher" was either a signal or a Freudian slip of epic proportions.



Shortly thereafter the group's natural fissiparousness prevailed: The P Group tried dance numbers. The Przecławice Brass failed to compete with Herb Alpert. Przecławice's former lead accordionist swore never to perform in an English-speaking country again, despairing of the press' inability to print a proper ł, and went on to renown across the Balkans. P Town enjoyed moderate success with Lovecraftian ballads, plugging along (often touring with Miskatonic Youth, and with HP and the Mighty Shoggoth) until appearances of their songs in the "Twilight" movies brought unexpected commercial success. With P Town providing most of the soundtrack for the fourth and fifth films, are the stars right for a Przecławice resurrection?

(The Secret History of Popular Music, 2014)

184: Yay! I'm glad I chose reasonably well. It was a fun way to spend an afternoon, so thanks for posing the question!

Re: interesting lyrics vs constraints, I think it's hard to catch all the cool little details unless you're kind of accustomed to the rhythm and pacing. There's a bunch of really clever (or shocking or funny) bits that are easy to miss. I wonder if you compared written lyrics (from someone who's good - Nas, not Li'l Jon) to songwriters known for lyrics/storytelling whether it would look similar.

192: I think you're misunderstanding the nature of the suggested tradeoff. It's not that hip hop lyrics can't be meaningful or whatever: it's that the constraints of the specific style we're discussing* force the meaningfulness to be stylized. Singer/songwriter music tends towards looser poetic forms that can allow for more naturalistic language, which means you can quote John Price without it being obvious that you're quoting a singer, let alone what style he sang it in. The couplets in 199 are unmistakably hip hop.

Poets have always liked trying highly constrained styles, so it's not that only certain forms allow meaning. But it would be pretty weird if haiku and villanelles didn't tend to lead to different expressions and different kinds of formalistic language.

Put it another way: mythical and legendary are similar but distinct words. A rapper is going to lean towards the one that fits the sound better rather than the one that means more precisely what they intend. It's not better or worse, but that's the tradeoff.

*again, short lines, internal rhyme, which isn't all hip hop, but has been the dominant, or maybe highest profile, style for awhile now

There's a bunch of really clever (or shocking or funny) bits that are easy to miss.

This gets at something else I wanted to raise: the lyrical density of (most) hip hop means that the writer gets a lot of bites at the apple, so to speak. This applies both to clever/shocking/funny phrasing and wordplay as well as the "meaningfulness". A Beatles ballad might only have a dozen or two distinct phrases, and any clunkers or semantically bleached ones will stand out. Even a fairly short hip hop track will have much, much more going on, and you'll get both wordplay/sonic bits and multiple takes on whatever the core of the track is.

Between you and me, the Beatles are really overrated.

Russell Crowe is the very worst in the Les Mis movie but the problem isn't even just that they got people who can't sing (or can't sing in a Broadway idiom) but that they decided to go all At Long Last Love on it and skip the studio in favor of people singing live. if they were Broadway singers, maybe fine. With people who need a leg up, very not good. Even Hugh Jackman who has been a successful leading man on Broadway sounds rough. If memory serves, Amanda Seyfried comes off better than anyone else. But it's a terrible movie adaptation.

Monteverdi, to me, is almost impenetrably dull.

It's like high school theater, if you only have one guy who can sing at all you have to put him in the biggest part even if it's a poor fit. Valjean just is not in Jackman's vocal range. But if you restrict yourself to actual movie stars you don't have great options. If Jackman was Javert and Crowe were not in the film that would be much better.

I think Crowe not being able to sing helped in the role. He seemed angrier for it.

Wow, and even Seyfried says: "In my career I have had a lot of moments where I just felt complete regret. I wish I could redo 'Les Misérables' completely because the live singing aspect, I still have nightmares about it."

She's from Allentown. She should do an album of Billy Joel covers starting with "Allentown."

Anyway, so far as I remember she sang fine.

I think her best Mamma Mia song is Lay All Your Love on Me from the first one. It also has dancing snorklers.

Maybe the Les Mis movie would have been better if it had dancing snorklers.

One of the toughest things about parenting is remembering to hide the chronologically-ordered list of all the people you've had unprotected sex with. I don't know why schools tell kids to write that down.

That's about Mama Mia, not Les Mis.

212: I never got much into Monteverdi's operas but the madrigals I think are amazing.

I didn't even know he had a garden.

I knew there was a family madrigal.

A madrigal, a fadrigal, and two point four kidrigals.

This thread is strangely intriguing when you have no idea who any of these people are

I've only met a handful in person.